Five at the New York Times and Eight at Salon Win the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, for Their Kung Flu Hate Crimes Hoax Targeting President Trump

Five at the New York Times and Eight at Salon Win the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, for Their Kung Flu Hate Crimes Hoax Targeting President Trump
By Nicholas Stix

Like the rest of the DNC media, the New York Times has promoted waves of hoaxes against President Trump.

Five years ago, the Times’ editors assigned two of its operatives, Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel Jr., to write a hoax asserting that President Trump, by calling the China virus “the China virus,” had incited his followers to engage in an orgy of anti-Asian hate crimes nationwide.

On March 23, 2020, the Times published, “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety.”

Eight days later, I thoroughly debunked Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel Jr.’s hoax in an exposé published by VDARE:

“Russia Hoax, Impeachment Hoax Didn’t Stop Trump, so the New York Times Tries Anti-Asian Hate-Crimes Hoax.”

I closed my exposé with:

So now they have a new narrative they think will take down Trump in November. Blame him for the Chinese Virus pandemic, which the Democrats ignored during their hoked-up impeachment, then claim he is a racist for calling SARS-CoV-2 the same thing they did earlier [“Media Called Coronavirus ‘Wuhan’ or ‘Chinese Coronavirus’ Dozens of Times,” by Ian Schwartz, Real Clear Politics, March 12, 2020].

Pulitzer Prize forthcoming.

The purpose of Tavernise, Oppel, Managing Editor Joseph Kahn, Executive Editor Dean Baquet, and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s hoax was to depict the usual waves of racist, black-on-asian hate crimes as racist hate crimes that had been committed by White Trump supporters, whom the President had incited. The Times operatives recruited racist, lying members of what I have dubbed the Ugly Asian Movement to back them up.

Ever since then, the Times and its allies have recycled and further embellished on its hoax, ignoring my debunking of it.

Thus, I bestow the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy upon New York Times “reporters” Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel Jr., Managing Editor Joseph Kahn, Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger.

I have also long noted that hoaxes travel in pairs, typically one from the past to go with one from the present, so that the media hoaxers can assert, “See! They’re doing the same thing as in the past!”

Thus, supporters of the Duke Rape Hoax asserted that the White-on-black “rape” of career criminal Crystal Gail Mangum was a repetition of the tradition of White slavemasters’ (non-existent) practice of routinely heading into the slave quarters and raping slave girls and women. Media hoaxers also add contemporary hoaxes to “support” their hoax du jour, by insinuating that their particular hoax is just one of countless, contemporary cases. The Associated Press’ Duke rape hoaxer Erin Texeira invented (or quoted transparently lying, black supremacist females’) non-existent incidents, in which White men walked up to black females and put their hands on them and demanded sex from them, something that black males but not White men are known to do.

As I have noted, one of the methods that fake journalists routinely engage in is to use established lies as their lede, or early on in a “thing,” before continuing with new lies. (Sometimes they don’t even need new lies.)

Thus it was that in a March 7, 2025 review of South Korean Bong Joon-ho’s movie, Mickey 17, Salon operative Coleman Spilde, recycled the New York Times’ debunked, five-year-old hate crime hoax.

“Only 34 days after Bong Joon-ho’s dark comedy Parasite made history at the Academy Awards by becoming the first non-English film to ever win the Oscar for best picture, the world as he so searingly satirized it in his class conflict thriller shut down. As quickly as that win seemed primed to open countless doors for international [foreign] cinema, the rapid spread of COVID-19 slammed those doors shut again. Days later, Donald Trump began to refer to COVID as “the Chinese virus,” a xenophobic and racist term that critics warned would contribute to the already rising numbers of hate crimes and racism against Asian American residents stateside and those of Asian descent globally. The number of Asian American hate crimes rose by 145% over the next year, while Trump’s foot-dragging response to the pandemic and xenophobic terminology had lethal ripples around the world that we’re still contending with today.”

[“In Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho rips into Trump with a rousing, space-set satire

“Two Robert Pattinsons lead the director’s follow-up to Parasite, one of the best films of the year so far”

[Salon, by Coleman Spilde, March 7, 2025.]

Not only did Salon operative Coleman Spilde repeat the thoroughly discredited New York Times Hoax, he further embellished on it! He lied about President Trump’s response to the Wuhan Virus (“foot-dragging”), and has now made him culpable for murders across the globe.

Thus is Coleman Spilde also one of the new Duranty-Blair laureates.

Should anyone scratch his head over my awarding a D-B to a movie critic, it is not just alleged reporters who invent or promote hoaxes. And not just leftists. At least one “conservative” movie critic, Breitbart’s Christian Toto, also promoted the Central Park Five Hoax.

Salon (or is it Slate? Has anyone ever seen the two in the same room together?) has become almost as bureaucratized as Variety, with duplicate and superfluous positions! Thus, I also bestow the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy upon most of the top of the masthead at Salon:

Amanda Wolfe, general manager (is that “publisher,” in English?)
Erin Keane, chief content officer (sounds like what we call editor-in-chief, in English)
Joseph Neese, editor in chief (chief content officer?)
Lexie Clinton, executive producer (Is this a movie? A TV show?)
Hanh Nguyen, executive editor
Andrew O’Hehir, executive editor
Igor Derysh, managing editor

(Note that the comrades at Salon also do not understand English language rules. Thus, they capitalized each job title, even though the title came after each name, e.g., “Igor Derysh, Managing Editor.” But the rule is to only capitalize job titles that come before the job-holder’s name, and without anything breaking up the set of title and name, e.g., Managing Editor Igor Derysh. Normally, I wouldn’t capitalize anything but proper names, the names of our country and of Israel, and the title of the American president, but only when referring to a specific, legitimate office-holder. However, since this article is for general consumption, I have reverted to traditional capitalization rules. The comrades at Salon are also strangers to other rules of grammar and style: They neglect proper hyphenation, by writing “editor in chief,” instead of editor-in-chief. I am sure, however, that they engage in improper, pc style rules.)

[D-B boilerplate follows, followed by the list of previous honorees.]

Walter Duranty wrote a series of early 1930s dispatches from the Soviet Union, where he was Times Moscow bureau chief, in which he lied about the Ukrainian Holocaust (“Holodomor”), in which Stalin deliberately starved millions of Kulaks (farmers/peasants) to death, through a man-made famine. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty reported that the peasants were happy and well-fed, and was rewarded for his lies with a Pulitzer prize.

Jayson Blair (here, here, and here) was an early 2000s black affirmative action hire, who alternately plagiarized reporters at other newspapers, and fabricated articles out of whole cloth, all for stories set hundreds and even thousands of miles away, while he sat in New York City cafés.


Previous Duranty-Blair winners are:

• CBS news producer Mary Mapes in 2004;

• Seven reporters and editors at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2006;

• ABC News reporter Brian Ross in 2012;

• Peter Berger (not the brilliant sociologist), of the American Interest, in 2013;

• Associated Press operative Tom Hays, in 2014;

• New York Times operative Farhad Manjoo in September, 2016;

• CNN’s Symone Sanders (2), Don Lemon, and Kate Bolduan (2) (P.S. and Jeff Zucker [5]), in November, 2016;

• New York Times Propaganda Officer Francis X. Clines in March, 2017;

• CNN Activist Jim Sciutto, in May, 2017;

• Associated Press “Reporter” Duncan Mansfield (posthumous), in September, 2017;

• CBS Sports operative Jack Maloney, Chairman Sean McManus, and President David Berson, in October, 2017;

• Associated Press operative Julie Pace, in October, 2017;

• Associated Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and Managing Editor Brian Carovillano, in November, 2017;

• “New York Times Operatives Richard Fausset (Alleged Reporter), Executive Editor Dean Baquet, and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn,” in December, 2017;

• Foreign Policy’s Max Boot, Jonathan Tepperman, and Ben Pauker, in January, 2018;

• Sports “Reporter” Les Carpenter, January 6, 2018;

• People Magazine “Reporter” Steve Helling and Editor Jess Cagle, August 3, 2018;

• Vanity Fair’s William D. Cohan and Graydon Carter, August 13, 2018;

• Vox Media Gang Member Zack Beauchamp, August 13, 2018;

• Politico Gang Member Daniel Lippman, September 18, 2018;

• CNN’s Manu Raju (and Jeff Zucker), on October 13, 2018;

• CNN’s Ana Cabrera, Marc Lamont Hill, and Jeff Zucker on October 18, 2018;

• CNN’s Kirsten Powers and Jeff Zucker, and USA Today’s Nicole Carroll, on October 27, 2018;

• Seven at The New Criterion and PJ Media, on January 22, 2024;

• Two at Deadspin and six at Variety, on March 12, 2024; and

• publisher Lachlan Murdoch, editor-in-chief Keith Poole, and three others at the New York Post, and Alesia Cullen at ABC News, June 24, 2024; and

• Olivia Nuzzi and David Haskell, at New York magazine, September 30, 2024.